Update
http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/news/760642-196/the-long-road.htmlSouhegan senior finally found stability she needed
Loud noises shattered the pre-dawn stillness on a chilly December morning in 2003, shaking 11-year-old Kori Reece from her slumber. Confusion followed, she said, and then the phone rang.
“It was the police,” said Reece, now a bright, gregarious 17-year-old Souhegan High senior on the verge of celebrating the day she used to think might never come – her high school graduation.
“They said, ‘Just lock your door and stay in your room.’ I didn’t know what was going on.”
She knew soon enough, though, and the news couldn’t have been much worse.
Those noises were gunshots. When they ended, almost as abruptly as they’d started, Reece’s mom and dad, along with another man, lay dead in the Reeces’ Deerfield home.
Thus began Kori and Lisa Reece’s unexpected coming-of-age odyssey, a mostly lonely, frightening, nomadic existence in which bouncing from guardian families to relatives half a continent away and searching desperately for some sense of structure, of stability, pushed summer camp and bike-riding, family beach trips and movie nights far into the background.
The horrible incident was ruled a double murder-suicide, which news reports at the time said Robert Reece carried out in the midst of a bitter divorce and custody battle with his estranged wife, Wanda Reece.
The third victim was Wanda Reece’s friend, Carl Stewart. Robert Reece had been living in California for about a year after the couple split, but had returned for a two-day divorce hearing in Derry District Court, according to news reports.
Kori Reece recalled her sister jumping from her bedroom window during the mayhem and running through the snow and cold to a neighbor’s house for help. The neighbors, the Kellys, were also family friends who took the girls in after the incident.
But a house wasn’t nearly the same as a home, the sisters soon came to realize. Tom Kelly became their guardian, Kori Reece said, but their lives were far from stable.
Souhegan student assistance counselor Holly Greenston, who met Reece when the teen enrolled at Souhegan midway through her sophomore year, said Reece was almost immediately thrust into a series of difficult “external challenges.” She faced family substance abuse, her providers’ “emotional instability and harmful decisions” regarding Reece, as well as financial hardship, Greenston said.
“Kori was largely left to fend for herself growing up,” she said. “The odds were certainly against her. She went through a lot.”
Reece was in middle school when an aunt and uncle in Michigan sent for the sisters, who arrived to a new world in a far-away state where everything was different. “They were good to us, gave us our own space, things like that, but it was really hard to adapt,” Reece said. “The type of friends I hung out with had changed dramatically. I felt lost.”
It got worse, she said, when Lisa graduated high school and enrolled at Ohio University, some four hours away.
“My sister was the only constant in my life,” Reece said. “Not having her with me was incredibly tough.”
The distance made it difficult for Lisa Reece to come home, and going to visit her sister wasn’t an option for Kori Reece.
“My aunt and uncle wouldn’t let me go,” she said. “They said a college campus was no place for a 14-year-old girl.”
Miserable, Reece called Kelly, begging to come home. “He said, ‘Sure, you can come back this weekend if you want,’ ” she said.
Things had changed, Kelly told Reece; he’d divorced, had a new girlfriend who, Reece said with a laugh, “had a ton of kids.”
But the homecoming was short-lived; soon, chaos and instability once again defined Reece’s life. By then a struggling, confused high school freshman, life’s dark clouds lifted one day when Lisa Reece called and said she was leaving OU and coming home to enroll at Hesser College.
The sisters joyfully reunited, getting an apartment in Amherst together. Lisa Reece went to Hesser while Kori enrolled at Souhegan. “We had our own place, even our own dog,” Reece said. “It was great, we were happy.”
Alas, yet again, things went south.
“We always got along great, but things changed,” Reece said. “She’d snap at me, and we’d fight a lot; I did things I shouldn’t. One day we had a really big fight over these rules she made, and that was it.”
Greenston said she had a lot of confidence in Reece from the start, sensing the teen’s inner strength and desire to set her life straight.
“Kori was never disrespectful, she never displaced blame,” Greenston said. “In my 12 years (as a school counselor), I’ve often wondered why some kids make it and some don’t, but I knew Kori has a lot of resiliency factors going for her. I was sure she’d make it back.”
Still, simply stepping into the stability of Souhegan and its array of support services wasn’t the magic bullet for Reece’s troubles, which by the start of her junior year had begun to manifest in scrapes with the law, poor choices of friends, a decline in schoolwork, and an unhealthy attraction to alcohol and drugs.
“I finally realized I had no structure in my life,” Reece said. “And I knew it’s something I really needed.”
This time, the planets aligned and all cylinders fired. With Greenston and other faculty members holding her ladder, Reece began the long climb from her four-year abyss.
She met a good kid named Dave Dougal, and began to shed the dysfunctional, harmful elements that dragged her down for years.
“I’ve been clean since the middle of my junior year,” Reece said proudly.
She and Dougal grew closer; soon Dougal’s parents took Reece in, providing the stability and normalcy that went missing five years before.
“They are so awesome,” Reece gushed. “They have the biggest hearts in the world. They make me feel so welcome.”
After graduation, Reece will keep the momentum going by starting classes at Johnson & Wales University, the Providence, R.I.-based school known best for its culinary program.
“I love to cook, it’s part of my love of creating things,” said Reece, who recalled how she turned to her enjoyment of art for respite when things weren’t so good.
Greenston, the next best thing to a proud parent, will surely join Reece in celebration on Friday, when Reece, Dougal and approximately 225 fellow Souhegan High seniors get their diplomas and ready for life’s next chapter.
“Kori knew she had to change and dedicated herself to growing and changing,” Greenston said. “Today she’s gained a sense of insight and accountability that even a lot of adults don’t have.”
